A fleeting dose of Monday-morning guilt, swiftly burnt away in the sun

I'm not one for dwelling on the negatives of my situation; thinking ''why me?' and 'how will we cope?' gets you absolutely nowhere. Stroke-survivors are often naturally prone to mood swings anyway and the after-effects of a stroke are bad enough to deal with without dwelling on them.

But just occasionally, I succumb. As I mentioned last week, bad weather doesn't help while Monday mornings can also be difficult. For instance, I was feeling particularly sorry for myself this Monday morning, before I went to the monthly meeting of a book club I visit at our local library.

One of the other regulars is a very pleasant lady of about my age who is wheelchair-bound for much of the time. I don't know precisely what's wrong, but it isn't nice. Yet she's always cheerful and chatty and likes her sport, especially tennis and cricket, just as much as I do.

We got talking on Monday and she said to me "Do you suffer from Monday morning guilt? That feeling you get when everyone else in the house is rushing around and dashing off to work and you're still in bed.'

You bet I do; I've just never heard it called that before. We both agreed that it's totally pointless as there's nothing we can do about our situation, so there's no sense feeling guilty about it, even if others sometimes try to make you feel guilty. And as we talked, I realised that this was another example of how talking to others about how you feel is therapeutic. It can't have been a coincidence that I had been thinking about this less than an hour before and now here I was, talking to someone who felt the same. I went away from the meeting feeling a lot less guilty about those Monday mornings. And of course, the warm/hot weather has improved my mood.

Tuesday saw me on Emily's treatment couch again. I thought I was used to the agonies this brings but this week, I actually said to her: "Wouldn't it be easier if I just died now? "It wouldn't look very good on me," she said. Indeed it wouldn't and I'm glad I didn't, because then I wouldn't have been able to run 20 yards down a field full of clover, nor climb up and down four steps without using the handrail, something I haven't done since my stroke.

At first, my brain told me I couldn't do it but as I've said numerous times, there's no such word as 'can't' in stroke-rehab. So I told my brain to behave itself, climbed those steps several times, ran down that sunlit field and felt a lot better about life. Another positive, I think.....